Being a teacher is not your usual 9-5 job. It requires extra work even on the weekends. From planning engaging lessons to manage classroom disruption, the job is certainly not easy. The obstacles a teacher encounters can arise from various directions. Teaching can be a joy but can easily present you with a tremendous headache. We have gathered a lot of personal experience from the professionals. And some challenges were mentioned repeatedly. We have compiled the top 5 challenges that an elementary school teacher faces every day. Remember, these are not the only problems a teacher faces. This list provides the common challenges to help you prepare and endure the challenges. Due to facing these challenges, many teachers quit elementary school teaching to pursue other careers. Suzanne Klein is one of the most successful names who quit elementary school teaching to build a successful business.
Top 5 Challenges
Before starting the list, we need to clarify something. These data are taken from the personal experience of real-life teachers from Facebook comments. It may not provide you with a full picture, but give you a glimpse of the challenges. Each educator faces different problems according to the area and environment of their workplace. The top five problems according to our Facebook comments are:
Planning lessons: The education system has highly changed with age. Nowadays the system is tilted towards a test-based curriculum. This makes the planning for lessons hard, especially for the inexperienced teachers. They find it really challenging to plan a lesson that will make the students engaged while preparing them for the test. This needs additional tasks, resulting in hours of unpaid work.
Classroom management: Dealing with young students often presents difficult situations. It’ll present you with an unforeseeable situation and keep you overwhelmed. One needs to prepare for various strategies to maintain the environment of the classroom. Without enough experience, these situations can often go out of hand. So, an elementary teacher often feels that they are walking on eggshells.
Funding: As per the comments, we can safely say most of the elementary school suffers from a lack of budget. This often forces the teachers to use old materials and outdated equipment. On top of that, some supervisors may judge a bare classroom without plenty of decorations and eye-catching colors. So, the teachers often have to spend their personal money on the classroom.
Energy: This may vary from person to person, but it’s common to feel exhausted by the daily job requirements. This job requires constantly communicating with the students, high expectations, and not so rarely dealing with yelling parents. Thus taking work home is almost always inevitable.
Distractions: With the evolution of technology, nowadays almost all toddlers have access to a smartphone or own them. This may interrupt your class greatly. The technologies are addictive and your students may find it more interesting than you. There’s no easy solution for this problem and you may have to deal with it on a daily basis.
The Pandemic Toll
2020 has presented us with the most challenging situation. The pandemic and lockdowns brought some major challenges that it needed addressing separately. Many teachers suffered from unemployment at this time. And when home teaching was introduced, it brought additional problems. No one was ready for the process and there was a lack of preparation for this situation. If a teacher was less tech-savvy, he faced huge difficulties to take the classes. They were trolled and disrespected online. Even if they knew the technology, some of them didn’t know how to take an engaging class when the students were not in front of them. And to be honest, this problem still continues. There is no certain way to evaluate the students as the process is still not top-notch.
Conclusion
Teachers are the northern star of a society. They guide the young minds and reshape them towards their potential. Every generation highly depends on its teachers. The elementary teachers work with your precious children to uncover their full potential. But they are not properly acknowledged or paid for their services. Still, they give their best for the betterment of a new future. With a little cooperation from you, they could have an easier life. Remember, if the teachers are not recognized for their work, there will be a time when there will be no one to teach. So, for the betterment of the backbone of our community, society, and world, the teachers should be nourished first.
